The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A service processor (SP) refers to a specialized microcontroller that manages the interface between system management software and platform hardware. An example of the SP may be a management controller, such as a baseboard management controller (BMC). The BMC can be embedded on the motherboard of a computer system, generally a server. For example, different types of sensors can be built into the computer system, and the BMC reads these sensors to obtain parameters such as temperature, cooling fan speeds, power status, operating system (OS) status, etc. The BMC monitors the sensors and can send alerts to a system administrator via the network if any of the parameters do not stay within preset limits, indicating a potential failure of the system. The administrator can also remotely communicate with the BMC to take some corrective action such as resetting or power cycling the system to get a hung OS running again.
In some cases, a virtual SP (VSP) or a virtual BMC stack may be provided on a normal server system without any hardware modification of the server system. However, the VSP or virtual BMC stack may require hardware components, such as an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) or a field programmable gate array (FPGA), to implement the logic for accessing components of the computer system, such as the environmental sensors and controllers. This requires changes in the hardware components of the computer system, which increases the cost of the system.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.